Courtesy SCOTUS: Liberty Valance Reborn

The whole business of the Hussein takedown, trial, and execution will undoubtedly - and rightly - be dissected for years to come, embodying as it does so many controversial issues. A powerful, cruel despot, dethroned through unprecedented and fundamentally unprovoked invasion by a one-time super-power. Unfamiliar judicial approaches imposed from outside the region. Capital punishment (and in a form that evokes Tombstone, primitive frontier justice, and at the least a disdain for human rights) at a time when the whole concept is a subject of considerable debate.

The obvious abuses and war-crimes committed by the Bush administration would likely in an actual democratic trial have been considered to have some mitigating effects. Let us not forget that many of the chemicals and munitions Hussein employed in the crimes he was accused of were supplied by the well-known war-profiteers Bush, Bush, Cheney, & Rumsfeld, et al.

It seems to me that more than one famous Western movie was built around the idea of a nascent democratic community with a growing need for and sense of justice and fairplay seizing control from vigilantes who had previously taken things into their own hands. This time the story is sadly different. In the case of Saddam Hussein, one heinous dictator seems to have been taken down by a new set of increasingly lawless vigilantes who in the end quite likely will have far more negative impacts on human history than did Hussein.

Josh Marshall pulls few punches in this post at Talking Points Memo:

-clip-

"Bush administration officials" are telling CNN that Saddam Hussein will be hanged this weekend. Convention dictates that we precede any discussion of this execution with the obligatory nod to Saddam's treachery, bloodthirsty rule and tyranny. But enough of the cowardly chatter. This thing is a sham, of a piece with the whole corrupt, disastrous sham that the war and occupation have been. Bush administration officials are the ones who leak the news about the time of the execution. One key reason we know Saddam's about to be executed is that he's about to be transferred from US to Iraqi custody, which tells you a lot. And, of course, the verdict in his trial gets timed to coincide with the US elections.

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur -- phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

Try to dress this up as an Iraqi trial and it doesn't come close to cutting it -- the Iraqis only take possession of him for the final act, sort of like the Church always left execution itself to the 'secular arm'. Try pretending it's a war crimes trial but it's just more of the pretend mumbojumbo that makes this out to be World War IX or whatever number it is they're up to now.

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren't grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing's a mess and that they're going to be remembered for it -- defined by it -- for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president's issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off -- so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic 'So There!'

-clip-

A "Year's 10" List Worthy of Parchment

Back when lists of the years "Top 10" or "Top 100" were somewhat novel, I kind of enjoyed these things. I occasionally even attended to the marathon plays on FM radio. But they are so pervasive now, and often cover such trivial territory (lip gloss?) that in most cases they interest me about as much as does People magazine (i.e., zilch). Yes, this can impair my performance in trivia contests and crosswords and such. I will muddle along.

But (h/t Glenn Greenwald) here's an unusual one for you, courtesy of Dahlia Lithwick in Slate, memorably entitled "The Bill of Wrongs." Please check out the entire article, and I also commend the embedded links, especially if there is any possibility there have been let-downs this year in your self-directed program of seeking actual news and facts rather than settling for the material the gerber-media (tube and print) were blending to a smooth unthreatening consistency:

I love those year-end roundups—ubiquitous annual lists of greatest films and albums and lip glosses and tractors. It's reassuring that all human information can be wrestled into bundles of 10. In that spirit, Slate proudly presents, the top 10 civil liberties nightmares of the year:

10. Attempt to Get Death Penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui
Long after it was clear the hapless Frenchman was neither the "20th hijacker" nor a key plotter in the attacks of 9/11, the government pressed to execute him as a "conspirator" in those attacks. Moussaoui's alleged participation? By failing to confess to what he may have known about the plot, which may have led the government to disrupt it, Moussaoui directly caused the deaths of thousands of people. This massive overreading of the federal conspiracy laws would be laughable were the stakes not so high. Thankfully, a jury rejected the notion that Moussaoui could be executed for the crime of merely wishing there had been a real connection between himself and 9/11.

9. Guantanamo Bay
It takes a licking but it keeps on ticking. After the Supreme Court struck down the military tribunals planned to try hundreds of detainees moldering on the base, and after the president agreed that it might be a good idea to close it down, the worst public relations fiasco since the Japanese internment camps lives on. Prisoners once deemed "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth" are either quietly released (and usually set free) or still awaiting trial. The lucky 75 to be tried there will be cheered to hear that the Pentagon has just unveiled plans to build a $125 million legal complex for the hearings. The government has now officially put more thought into the design of Guantanamo's court bathrooms than the charges against its prisoners.

-clip-

6. The State-Secrets Doctrine
The Bush administration's insane argument in court is that judges should dismiss entire lawsuits over many of the outrages detailed on this very list. Why? Because the outrageously illegal things are themselves matters of top-secret national security. The administration has raised this claim in relation to its adventures in secret wiretapping and its fun with extraordinary rendition. A government privilege once used to sidestep civil claims has mushroomed into sweeping immunity for the administration's sometimes criminal behavior.

-clip-

1. Hubris
Whenever the courts push back against the administration's unsupportable constitutional ideas—ideas about "inherent powers" and a "unitary executive" or the silliness of the Geneva Conventions or the limitless sweep of presidential powers during wartime—the Bush response is to repeat the same chorus louder: Every detainee is the worst of the worst; every action taken is legal, necessary, and secret. No mistakes, no apologies. No nuance, no regrets. This legal and intellectual intractability can create the illusion that we are standing on the same constitutional ground we stood upon in 2001, even as that ground is sliding away under our feet.

-clip-

Waiting for George to Head Down to the Well

Our clicker inadvertently snagged on the VP giving something resembling a eulogy to Gerald Ford this evening. I probably watched more cheney than I have previously been able to keep down without Pepto-bismol or other artifices.

But it was an uncanny performance. I detected few if any of the usual grimaces, vaderish malevolence, or body language that has always so clearly limned cheney's by-now well-documented evil pact-with-the devil personality. Whether it was a body double or simply the cadaver shot full of leftovers from a Six Feet Under outtake, I found it genuinely surreal.

As of course is the sudden elevation of Ford to sainthood. It's true that compared to swine like Nixon, Reagan, and Bush (two, filed under category Betraying Country for Self), Ford was almost as likeable, charming, and probably effective as a president as, say, Chevy Chase would have been. But the veneration does the usual job of making this whole ceremonial business stink to the rafters.

The only way I can accept it is if it compels our swagger-chimp with the pneumatic codpiece to consider an early out. Injection, bungy-jumping with expired rubber, actually piloting a high-speed aircraft, who cares. The troubling part is that he already seems attuned to the idea that death erases all the mediocrity. Though come to think of it that's my take based on Ford model. George must be thinking of it in a different fashion, since mediocrity is the best he has on record!

So it's really a matter of arranging an intervention to get him to realize he's no longer in the grade- and performance-inflated environments he enjoyed at Yale and Harvard and Texas. Back in those Glory Days he had multiple generations of owned fawning chums of gramps and dad and all prepared to lose his records, take care of the troubling credentialing processes, buy him companies, and even buy back the companies at inflated prices after he'd confirmed his absolute incompetence and lack of interest.

But the more troubling bit is that George hasn't seemed to grasp the essence of great referenced number by the Boss, which rings in my ears after hearing it twice on the radio this week. In essence, "time slips away and leaves you with little more than Boring Stories." History seems unlikely to credit ghb with any no-hitters or great speedballs. Memory is fallible, but the record seems way too consistent on what this guy has meant to the US of A. He may have been born here, but he is so clearly not Of Here. And no "immigration policy" will make him an American patriot, never mind retrofit a record of anything but shame. On him, on his family, and on our country.

David Kurtz, posting today at Talking Points Memo, has some related reactions to the Ford remembrances, of heightened relevance these days, that I second:

As painful as it was, I watched a bit of ABC's coverage of the arrival of President Ford's remains at the Capitol this evening. Among the guest commentators were David Gergen (that hipster--he's got his own website) and Richard Norton Smith, both the sorts of conservatives that Democrats and the media love to have around for their tempered views. Still, to hear Gergen and and Smith chatting it up with Charlie Gibson and Barbara Walters (who was vacationing in the same locale as Henry Kissinger when word came of Ford's death) about the poisonous atmosphere that existed in Washington around the time Ford took office--how there were protesters with the temerity to stand outside the White House gates and scream that Nixon be impeached, how buses were lined up along Pennsylvania Avenue as barricades, how troops were stationed around Washington to put down any insurrection, how the country was at war with itself--you get the sense that in their minds the unwashed masses were just as much to blame for the tenor of the times as the suited white guys in the inner sanctums of the White House. I had always thought that to the extent Ford had, in the oft-used phrase, restored confidence in the Presidency he had done so by elevating the conduct of those in the White House, raising the office above the shabby habits of his predecessor's men. It had not occurred to me (although it probably should have) until listening to Gergen and Smith that for many people Ford's signature service to the country was calming the waters so that the rabble quieted down and went home. It is in that sense that the pardon of Nixon helped "heal" the country (clearing the way three decades later for Smith to reminisce about the Ford children playing in Statuary Hall on Saturdays in a quaint Washington of a different era). All these years later, you can still discern a liberal from a conservative by whether she perceives the protesters or all the President's men as a greater threat to democracy.